ve it, I find it
necessary to abandon my present dignified position, seize my hat, open
the front door, and try a stronger method.

WAITING FOR THE SHIP.

A FORT POINT IDYL.

About an hour's ride from the Plaza there is a high bluff with the
ocean breaking uninterruptedly along its rocky beach. There are several
cottages on the sands, which look as if they had recently been cast up
by a heavy sea. The cultivated patch behind each tenement is fenced in
by bamboos, broken spars, and driftwood. With its few green cabbages and
turnip-tops, each garden looks something like an aquarium with the water
turned off. In fact you would not be surprised to meet a merman digging
among the potatoes, or a mermaid milking a sea cow hard by.

Near this place formerly arose a great semaphoric telegraph with its
gaunt arms tossed up against the horizon. It has been replaced by an
observatory, connected with an electric nerve to the heart of the great
commercial city. From this point the incoming ships are signalled, and
again checked off at the City Exchange. And while we are here looking
for the expected steamer, let me tell you a story.

Not long ago, a simple, hard-working mechanic had amassed sufficient by
diligent labor in the mines to send home for his wife and two children.
He arrived in San Francisco a month before the time the ship was due,
for he was a western man, and had made the overland journey and knew
little of ships or seas or gales. He procured work in the city, but as
the time approached he would go to the shipping office regularly every
day. The month passed, but the ship came not; then a month and a week,
two weeks, three weeks, two months, and then a year.

The rough, patient face, with soft lines overlying its hard features,
which had become a daily apparition at the shipping agent's, then
disappeared. It turned up one afternoon at the observatory as the
setting sun relieved the operator from his duties. There was something
so childlike and simple in the few questions asked by this stranger,
touching his business, that the operator spent some time to explain.
When the mystery of signals and telegraphs was unfolded, the stranger
had one more question to ask. "How long might a vessel be absent before
they would give up expecting her?" The operator couldn't tell; it would
depend on circumstances. Would it be a year? Yes, it might be a year,
and vessels had been given up for lost after two years and had com